About

I am a fashion designer turned illustrator and visual artist.

Fashion kept me fascinated because I like the human body as a moving sculpture as it is revealed and disguised by clothing.
As a designer I most enjoyed generating raw ideas for designs and to make drawings for them, from them and about them.
Drawing the human body was so much better than actutally.... technical garment construction.
The Fashion Industry I found, had so many limitations.

Designing images for a purpose (that's illustration, isn't it?) seemed to offer so much more room for what i was interested in.
You can even find an image to represent "things" that really, you can't see.
I still stand by this very personal statement. Finding a visual representation for something that struggles to be visible otherwise - that's quite a mission.

I don't see myself as a traditional illustrator. I don' t do "techniques". I like to find a visual code that fits the purpose and I like to be a bit radical there.
Abstraction, collage and some sort of deconstuctivist approach seems to suit me.  Imagery that struggles to come free from its abstract origin.

I like line, as pure and simple as it can be, with only a bit of colour if necessary, as little as possible.
I sometimes feel as if I have to do things a bit neater, (the learnt placing of a cast shadow) but this mostly turns out to go pear-shaped. So, in the end, I try to stay away from it.

What inspires me? Markmaking as it occurs on the surface of the Earth, Picasso's drawings (his confidence and skill with line...),  Quentin Blake's illustrations (I wonder if he has a secret degree in Fashion  & Design for all his intuitive knowledge of how a garment supports the life of its wearer) and architectural illustrations.

Architect's drawings and illustrations can have have such muted and subtle colour scales (very elegant! ...here speaks the ex-fashion designer), lots of thin black lines, some dotted some not, measured precision and the all deal with creating a illusion of space where function is important. Like fashion creates homes for the body to move in, so architecture designs houses for more than just one body.